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In February 2020, the families of three cisgender girls filed a federal lawsuit against the Connecticut Association of Schools, the nonprofit Connecticut Interscholastic Athletic Conference and several boards of education in the state. The families were upset that transgender girls were competing against the cisgender girls in high school track leagues. They argued that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in high school sports and should be forced to play on boys’ teams.
Conservatives around the country have jumped on the question. Attorney General Merrick Garland was pressed on the issue during his confirmation hearing last month. State legislators around the country are pushing bills that would force trans girls to compete on boys’ teams. In describing the Connecticut case in the Wall Street Journal, opinion writer Abigail Shrier expressed a representative argument: when transgender girls compete on girls’ sports teams, she wrote, “[cisgender] girls can’t win.”
The opinion piece left out the fact that two days after the Connecticut lawsuit was filed by the cisgender girls’ families, one of those girls beat one of the transgender girls named in the lawsuit in a Connecticut state championship. It turns out that when transgender girls play on girls’ sports teams, cisgender girls can win. In fact, the vast majority of female athletes are cisgender, as are the vast majority of winners. There is no epidemic of transgender girls dominating female sports. Attempts to force transgender girls to play on the boys’ teams are unconscionable attacks on already marginalized transgender children, and they don’t address a real problem. They’re unscientific, and they would cause serious mental health damage to both cisgender and transgender youth.
Policies permitting transgender athletes to play on teams that match their gender identity are not new. The Olympics have had trans-inclusive policies since 2004, but a single openly transgender athlete has yet to even qualify. California passed a law in 2013 that allows trans youth to compete on the team that matches their gender identity; there have been no issues. U SPORTS, Canada’s equivalent to the U.S.’s National Collegiate Athletic Association, has allowed transgender athletes to compete with the team that matches their identity for the past two years.
The notion of transgender girls having an unfair advantage comes from the idea that testosterone causes physical changes such as an increase in muscle mass. But transgender girls are not the only girls with high testosterone levels. An estimated 10 percent of women have polycystic ovarian syndrome, which results in elevated testosterone levels. They are not banned from female sports. Transgender girls on puberty blockers, on the other hand, have negligible testosterone levels. Yet these state bills would force them to play with the boys. Plus, the athletic advantage conferred by testosterone is equivocal. As Katrina Karkazis, a senior visiting fellow and expert on testosterone and bioethics at Yale University explains, “Studies of testosterone levels in athletes do not show any clear, consistent relationship between testosterone and athletic performance. Sometimes testosterone is associated with better performance, but other studies show weak links or no links. And yet others show testosterone is associated with worse performance.” The bills’ premises lack scientific validity.
Claiming that transgender girls have an unfair advantage in sports also neglects the fact that these kids have the deck stacked against them in nearly every other way imaginable. They suffer from higher rates of bullying, anxiety and depression—all of which make it more difficult for them to train and compete. They also have higher rates of homelessness and poverty because of common experiences of family rejection. This is likely a major driver of why we see so few transgender athletes in collegiate sports and none in the Olympics.
On top of the notion of transgender athletic advantage being dubious, enforcing these bills would be bizarre and cruel. Idaho’s H.B. 500, which was signed into law but currently has a preliminary injunction against its enforcement, would essentially let people accuse students of lying about their sex. Those students would then need to “prove” their sex through means including an invasive genital exam or genetic testing. And what happens when a kid comes back with XY chromosomes but a vagina (as occurs with people with complete androgen insensitivity syndrome)? Do they play on the boys’ team or the girls’ team? This is just one of several conditions that would make such sex policing impossible.
It’s worth noting that this isn’t the first time people have tried to discredit the success of athletes from marginalized minorities based on half-baked claims of “science.” There is a long history of similarly painting Black athletes as “genetically superior” in an attempt to downplay the effects of their hard work and training.
Recently, some have even harkened back to eras of “separate but equal,” suggesting that transgender athletes should be forced into their own leagues. In addition to all the reasons why this is unnecessary that I’ve already explained, it is also unjust. As we’ve learned from women’s sports leagues, separate is not equal. Female athletes consistently have to deal with fewer accolades, less press coverage and lower pay. A transgender sports league would undoubtedly be plagued with the same issues.
Beyond the trauma of sex-verification exams, these bills would cause further emotional damage to transgender youth. While we haven’t seen an epidemic of transgender girls dominating sports leagues, we have seen high rates of anxiety, depression and suicide attempts. Research highlights that a major driver of these mental health problems is rejection of someone’s gender identity. Forcing trans youth to play on sports teams that don’t match their identity will worsen these disparities. It’s a classic form of transgender conversion therapy, a discredited practice of trying to force transgender people to be cisgender and gender-conforming.
Though this can be hard for cisgender people to understand, imagine someone told you that you were a different gender and then forced you to play on the sports team of that gender throughout all of your school years. You’d likely be miserable and confused.
As a child psychiatry fellow, I spend a lot of time with kids. They have many worries on their minds: bullying, sexual assault, divorcing parents, concerns they won’t get into college. What they’re not worried about is transgender girls playing on girls’ sports teams.
Legislators need to work on the issues that truly impact young people and women’s sports—lower pay to female athletes, less media coverage for women’s sports and cultural environments that lead to high dropout rates for diverse athletes—instead of manufacturing problems and “solutions” that hurt the kids we are supposed to be protecting.
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As a short man let me tell you how hilarious it is when people bitch about fairness in sports when it comes to transrights. Sports are not fair at all, they are literally a display of ableism. Transwomen deserve a spot on womens teams fullstop its not complicated.
Absolutely. Top sprinters have a whole different kind of muscle structure to the average person. I can train 24/7 for the rest of my life and I’m never going to develop a whole different muscle structure.
As a short person I could never be the best basketballer, and with shorter legs I’ll never be a hurdler.
Sport is always a good percentage “what you’re born with”.
Absolutely agreed! I’m a short trans guy, and I go swimming 4 times a week. Admittedly it’s not competitive, but the huge range in speed and stamina is just staggering. There’s women that are faster than me, or who can keep going longer. There’s men that are slower or have less endurance. Human beings are so incredibly varied, physically speaking, that the difference within groups is much greater than the difference between groups. In so many sports, an inch of extra height, or slightly longer arms, or slightly more flexible joints, or a slight variation in hormonal configuration, can all give someone a competitive edge. The only way to have truly fair sports is to only allow identical twins to compete against each other.
That said, I do accept the science that suggests 2+ years on HRT is a reasonably fair threshold when it comes to trans people, given what is known about testosterone’s effects on the body. It’s not a perfect solution, since 100% fairness is impossible, but it’s a compromise that has scientific backing, which is probably the best that can be asked for.
It really is interesting watching the mental gymnastics involved in ensuring ‘fairness’ in sport this one particular instance and no other. I’ve noticed that the people I encounter who feel the most strongly about this think of themselves as ‘big powerful men’. I’m not big, or particularly powerful, so it’s always been obvious to me that it’s basically a load of bull. There are plenty of women who could outperform me at any sport, and there always have been. Meanwhile I saw competitive cornhole on TV at a bar the other day and it was gender segregated. Wtf?
Or they could just stop going by sex/gender all together and separate leagues by bodymass or skill level
For any given activity level and body weight, people with active testosterone in their system have more muscle mass and less body fat than people without significant levels of testosterone.
Body mass division doesn’t solve the problem
That’s literally how it already works with sex specific leagues. If you don’t want that, mixed sex sports leagues have always been thing. This is such an idiotic non issue.
I don’t think they currently separate e.g. women’s soccer into leagues by bodyweight…
Body weight as in males generally weigh more than females. You do realize a lot of sports have weight classes right? Having a weight class in soccer would make no sense, size isn’t really a factor in it.
Muscle mass? Qualifying heats? Idk
And that would again would be based off sex since males biologically have more muscle mass than females.
A sport wouldn’t be much of a sport if everyone was exactly the same.
So? Then what’s the problem
There is no problem with sex divided sports. That was my point lol
I think you’re missing the point here. The average of all male weight may be heavier that all females (citation needed) but there’s plenty of women much bigger than a lot of men. If we divided by weight, qualification speeds, league, or a hundred other ways that things can be divided it’s much more fair and inclusive.
Yeah but if you look at sports like weightlifting, where competitors are divided up by weight, the men in the corresponding weight catagories lift way higher than the women. If we merged the Men and women into a single pool, women weightlifters would no longer feature in top level play. Sport can never be completely fair because people are different. Yes with hardwork, you can achieve great things but that alone is not enough. Look at Mesi for example - he works very hard but I doubt he works harder than every other player in the world. It’s just that he has innate skill to accompany his hardwork and that makes him one of the best. Other footballers could very well claim that it unfair for him to play with them when he has more talent than them
You’re so close to getting it. Yes, sport is intrinsically unfair, not everyone has a talent. So if you want to make it fair you can divide it up into classes. Male and female are not the only possible classes, it’s in fact a bit of a shit one. Other divisions are more fair.
Other divisions are more fair.
Like what though. If we divide by bodyweight, then like the scenario I discussed in weightlifting, women will be absent from top level competition and then they will complain that they are being unfairly pitted against men. Hell female athletes are already saying this when they have to go up against trans women.
I’m not against that but historically men tend to do better, so that would mean men would largely dominate the Olympics, football, etc.
I mean where is the healthy debate about this?
Maybe there is something about sports and how it’s generating so much money that it’s the most money generating way is to show men losing (obviously in some way so you can interpret it as it was not ‘the fault of the team’, it was unluck, the referees, unluck again etc, if only “guy” would havedone this and not that) but make believe it might be possible one day maybe.
I got into a very strange argument with a relative (who doesn’t know any trans people -at least none they are aware of). They were absolutely convinced that ANY man is better than ALL women at all things. Athletic, intellectual, creative; men are inherently better at all of it.
Therefore, in their mind, anyone who was a man/boy at any point in their lives will be better at everything than a cis woman ever could be. So trans women will always dominate no matter what.
The profound misogyny at the base of their argument was flabbergasting.
@StringTheory @Five that’s something that some people do actually believe. it is scary that people like that run around, but every ones in a while you run into that sort of person.
This same relative also argued that cis men would go through transition just so they could be at the top of their sport (because they’d beat all the women) or so that they could get scholarships ear-marked for women (because they would be smarter than all the women and would win the scholarships). Somehow that seemed reasonable to them? How on earth!?!?
Grandma doesn’t have a gender and doesn’t realise why people who have genders think they’re important. She’d be equally happy identifying as a man and she doesn’t realise that’s unusual.
My mother is like this & to a degree I am as well. I’d probably find my own gender as important to me as… the colour of the socks you last wore. Likewise changes to my gender.
Thankfully she is supportive of people doing what they need to do to feel ok, even if she cannot grasp that anyone would have any feelings attached to the matter.
But I dunno that this is so unusual - in the absence of some gender-related pain (or joy), I suspect a lot of people just drift along as whatever society assigns them without giving it thought.
It’s amazing watching sporting bodies ruin their own sports for transphobes who don’t care about women’s sport.
Seems to me there is near unanimity from relevant scientists & physicians that female trans athletes have no advantage over their female cis counterparts.
If the state of that knowledge changes, then by all means revisit the rules, but unless & until that happens, banning trans women & girls from competing is deeply unfair & arbitrary.
I could see that a trans girl or woman who has yet to commence HRT might have some physical advantages, but until we’re considering national level competition, I think it is reasonable to let this (utterly tiny) minority compete.
For high level stuff, it would be easy to have a requirement of being on HRT for a minimum period. That said, attaining one’s peak achievable performance whilst going through what amounts to a second round of puberty sounds… impossibly hard.
I think we really need to know why sports are segregated.
If it’s because males have physical advantages over females, then you really want to separate by some kind of size or strength criterion. Weight classes, like wrestling or boxing.
If its because we don’t want children titillated by seeing the opposite sex change clothes in the locker room, then you need to come up with some way to address people with same-sex attraction.
If it’s just because that’s the way sports were when you were a kid, then let the two transgender kids play with the 10,000 cisgender kids.
FINA already bars trans-women who went through male puberty from competing as women, and that seems like a pretty fair compromise. At least until you pile on states trying to ban medical care for transgender youth - i.e. puberty blockers - or other difficulties many trans-youth have in obtaining such care. My understanding is that HRT after puberty doesn’t come anywhere close to the biological effects of actual puberty, in terms of strength, size, and speed.
FINA already bars trans-women who went through male puberty from competing as women, and that seems like a pretty fair compromise.
I didn’t know I was trans until I was 18 because nobody explained it in a way that made sense to me. The literature was not made accessible. You need to put a ton of effort into educating kids before you can put in a rule like that fairly.
I know a woman who didn’t realise she was trans until her 50’s. Like she’d got married, had kids, and was thinking that every bloke was walking round like this. It was only when it became more of a thing a thing in public consiousness that she was like “Oh shit, I’ve been a woman the whole time!”
Not surprising. Being trans feels a lot like being straight. “I like the feminine form, men are supposed to like the feminine form, what’s the problem? Wait a fucking minute, did you just say most men don’t enjoy looking at women so they can imagine themselves female? The fuck?”
You only know life from your own experience then you assume everyone else is the same.
Do you know some people don’t have an inner voice? That one really freaked me out when I learned it but then it explained a lot. I imagine realising that you’re trans is like that times a thousand.
People who don’t realize they’re trans until adulthood aren’t really the target for people making rules for high school sports. Even college - if you’re a competitive men’s athlete, only to realize in your junior year that you’re trans - do you just give up on the men who’ve been your team mates and peers for years and try to form new relationships with the women’s team (if there even is a women’s team in your sport)?
We’re whittling down what was already a small minority of trans athletes to essentially unique hypothetical individuals. I don’t really think it’s possible to make rational rules to address every possible set of circumstances with such a poorly understood phenomenon. Best you can do is offer some guidelines, and minimizing distortions due to sexual dimorphism is a decent guideline. If there’s a male not beyond the size of competitive females, then that trans-woman seems fair to play with cis-women. If she’s the size of Jason Momoa because she’s been playing football as a man for 20 years, I doubt that a course of HRT will make her any less overpowering to competitive cis-women.
Maybe it’s just a sacrifice she will have to make, to postpone her medical transition and keep playing football, or begin her transition and accept that it will cost her the starting position on the men’s team without access to an equivalent women’s team. I mean, few of us can have everything we want, and most competitive athletes have to sacrifice some other aspects of their identity to be competitive.
Genuian question here, are there any studies on bone structure and joint strength of trans athletes? The article says there’s no scientific evidence to prevent trans athletes but only talks about testosterone. The complains I have heard center more around a person who had natural male hormones until say 16, and so had puberty male growth in bones and joints to support male muscle mass. Then, transitioned. The hormone levels would be the same as any other female athlete, but would prior bone and joint growth be “locked in”?
Does that give an advantage? Especially in a sport like swimming where arm length and shoulder size are so critical for the physics of propultion through water.
You can short-cut all the biology and just observe that bad trans athletes stay bad after transition, middling ones stay middling, and stellar ones stay stellar.
There may still be some minor advantages or disadvantages left but the ballpark looks fair, also don’t forget that there’s plenty of cis genetic freaks – have you seen Michael Phelps’ hands? Should he be disqualified because it’s unfair that he’s more fish than human? Should we change basketball rules so that short people aren’t at a disadvantage?
There might be but keep in mind longer arms needs more force to drive and trans women generally don’t have the testosterone to grow large muscles.
Also like all sport is unfair, it’s inherently the point. When a tall, muscular, woman wins a swimming contest nobody is waiting in the wings to measure her serium testosterone level and determine whether it was legitimate. We accept that people have physiological variations, different economic opportunities, and different mental capacities. We are interested in exploring what a person can do within rough approximately fair bands of competition.
Trans people generally want to transition early, so there’s not a huge amount of time for puberty growth or lack thereof (remember trans men dammit!) given proper support for most people. Even later transitioners don’t seem to have any significant advantage, given the lack of winning they’re doing. I suspect any advantage that may exist is massively, massively, dwarfed by being wealthy enough to hire competent coaches/take the time to train + good childhood for high likelihood of positive psychological coping with stress.
Trans people generally lose on both those fronts.
Does that give an advantage? Especially in a sport like swimming where arm length and shoulder size are so critical for the physics of propultion through water.
I think you answered your own question. I have nothing against trans people, but they really should not compete in women’s sports, though women’s sports are often unfair as it is. I think everyone should just accept that if you transition you cannot be a professional athlete anymore & most people do just that.
The argument about trans people not being better athletes right now is not very good, because if allowing trans people to compete became widespread, I guarantee you they would start winning everything in women’s sports, because people would become carrier trans & all the potential gains would be maximized by professional coaches & their medical teams.
The hormone therapy they go through prevents all the supposed masculine traits they develop during puberty.
They are lying, or to be more exact, lying by omission. Of course there is bone density differences, on top of the skeletal ones. The “hormones will change their muscles,” is a red herring. Muscle fiber density remains unchanged, drugs or no drugs, all they have to do is go to the gym and they will develop musculature that is different to actual women. This is why they seem to onpy focus on “muscle mass,” over muscle fiber density. No way they do not know the difference.
So is centre of gravity, and other factors, that can play a role in sports. Men will always develop more upper body strenght over women. They are cherry picking arguments hoping that most people who do not know a lot of Human Anatomy will fall for it. In order to gain public opinion. It’s underhanded, or at least it looks like it.
Hell, even skin elasticity and skin patterns are different between men and women.
Transgender women athletics are facing a catch 22 situation: If they win it is becuz of their “biological sex” But if they lose then it is becuz of their harmful transition surgeries.
Either way there is a reason to hate them.
Separate male and female teams is the problem in the first place. It just reinforces the gender binary and makes life more difficult for trans, non binary and intersex people.
Exactly, switch over to leagues based on whatever benchmark makes sense for your sport and call it a day
The types of benchmarking needed to measure an individual athletes potential to ensure they aren’t sandbagging would be too costly to implement at anything but the highest levels of athletics.
It is an incredibly complex solution to a non problem.
Let trans athletes compete with cis athletes.
There simply aren’t enough trans athletes for this to be a problem worth considering at a systemic level. At an individual level, if someone lacks the level of self awareness to enter an event where they consistently beat cis women(like if they were an accomplished cis athlete just a few months into transition), then there can be an individual ruling on that person.
Don’t fall for the conservative trap, their hyperbole is engineered (in part) to produce untenable “solutions” from progressives.
It is a problem systematically already, we’re seeing women be pushed from top ranks bit-by-bit. In Chicago, trans women won gold and silver for a biking event. This is going to continue to happen, especially if what trans people are saying is true and there are many more trans people who will be coming out and living how they want.
Trans athletes can compete with biologically-aligned people of the opposite sex in trans-only events, which should be a thing for each sport. This is by far the easiest, most rational decision that doesn’t stomp on biological women. Trans men take testosterone, and trans women take estrogen. Let them either compete in the men’s division or against each other.
What, exactly, is “untenable” about opening a division for them?
What are biological people? Are there non-biological people?
You’re right, I worded that strangely. Changed it to biologically-alligned for clarity.
My loose understanding is that a lot of men’s divisions are actually open, while it’s women’s divisions that are strictly confined to women. For some sports though, there’s such a strong sex gap that very few women are realistically competitive with men. Ensuring a division where competitively play is the entire purpose of having women’s divisions in the first place.
This obviously depends a lot of the individual sport though. Muscle mass and strength are a lot more pivotal in something like weightlifting or American football than in archery.
Agreed. Another factor is that women’s divisions exist in many cases not because men have a competitive advantage, but because the competitions are so male-dominated in terms of culture and number of competitors that women’s divisions make the competition more accessible to women. eg, chess. Men aren’t better at chess than women, and the men’s division is actually open, so the women’s division exists because chess has a male-dominated culture and women feel safer being able to compete against only other women.
Let’s make a bet. We combine men and women’s sports. There will eventually be no women in sports, because, even though the top ranking women can beat some, or even most, men, they cannot beat the top men.
If this wasn’t the case, we wouldn’t see such a wide gap in points/speed/weights/whatever between top men and women in their respective sport.
There may still be trans people in said sport (though I doubt it, but maybe), but there will definitely be no women.
Let’s say this does happen. Then what do we do for women in sports, who are now, by default, completely excluded?
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When would a woman have any chance in a marathon or anything related? This looks like a proposal from someone who never watched any sport event
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I’m sorry, but its ridiculous and a very obvious ploy to accuse my thoughts as sexism. Its not sexist to understand biological reality. Wishing it weren’t the case doesn’t do anything, nor does simply pretending biological differences don’t exsist. You can make a statement out loud as much as you’d like, but it doesn’t make it true.
In modern society, women have been more than welcome to compete in men’s sports. How they compete with one another is a reality check to anyone who won’t deny the truth. For example, the Chicago marathon world record holders has a max difference of a full 13 minutes between top male and female category runners. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_winners_of_the_Chicago_Marathon
Can women compete in the men’s division of running for the Chicago marathon? Absolutely. But why would they when there is absolutely zero chance of them placing? To put it into even more perspective, the top woman runner would have placed 21st had she run in the men’s division. So, Zero. Chance. of placing at all.
You can see women slowly being pushed out by trans women athletes in real time now, in biking, again in Chicago, where trans women athletes placed silver and gold. It’s only going to take one more joining in to push biological women out of placing in the competition for good, and then women will be back to why we created women’s division in the first place.
Females rarely take up F1 racing because of how hard it is on your body. During a race a driver is exposed to up to five times gravity pushing down on them, making it harder to breathe, pump blood around their body and move their arms and legs. Oh, and to top it all off, they are sitting in a position which means that the feet are raised up in line with the chest. So to pretend we’re all just too scared of men to join in is very disingenuous. The reality is, due to how severe the sport is on the body, women just won’t match up to men when it comes to racing. There was a recent change in effect where every team will have a female racer… of course, racing in a women’s division, because they’d be obliterated in the regular division.
I’m not fighting you. Plain and simple. There’s no ploy here. Learn to be a human being and talk about things.
I’m not fighting. I’ve used no personal attacks. You’ve accused my rational as coming from a sexist mindset, which is a fighting tactic, but I won’t do that back because I don’t want to fight, I want to have a discussion where we make the best arguments we can and see which ones hold up. Calling out a tactic isn’t fighting you, it’s bringing awareness to what’s happening and why. If you were offended by the word “ploy,” I apologize, but it seems a bit hypocritical since you accused me of sexism.
Saying all that, do you have any pushback against what I’ve laid out? From where I stand, I feel like the arguments I’ve made are rational and sound.
Motorsport like F1 leans very heavily on strength and endurance. You also need to weigh I think at least 80 kg? That’s already rare for a woman to reach as weight.
It’s one of the most physical demanding sports you can do.
the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don’t collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don’t need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.
the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it’s great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.
i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn’t mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you’re playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn’t have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won’t be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.
the idea that the only solution to the gender based segregation of sports is to make a single sports category for every person is disingenuous. weight classes in wrestling exist. there are plenty of ways to organize sports that don’t collapse the diversity of the human condition into a single ranked competitive event, and there are plenty of people who currently engage in co-ed sports for recreational purposes that like it just fine. there is a small minority of athletes that compete for the highest possible performance, but the vast vast majority of people who do sports are just regular folks, and don’t need arbitrary gender barriers to have a good time.
Yes, weight classes in wrestling exsist, and we still have women’s division, because women and men in the same weight class would still have the outcome of men placing top outcomes in those weight classes.
The issue isn’t the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person’s life might turn out. To be winning these competitions means money, scholarships, endorsements, careers. To be at that level, kids today start getting pretty serious in middle school, and definitely serious in high school, due to the scholarship/school acceptance possibilities for universities, universities scout from high schools, and pro leagues scout from universities, and careers are made there. These are big deals and big opportunities, so to say “its just fun.” Is downplaying the serious of it. That’s not even getting into the severe dangers that can happen to women physically by going against a man in team sports. Even sports like soccer can be dangerous in that way, far more than what we deal acceptable.
the rules set out to make competition at the highest levels of sport possible are not by default the best way for regular human people to do sport for their own pleasure. things that could be exclusionary in a ranked competition are not so in the context of average human performance, or even below average human performance. the Paralympics is a fantastic event that showcases the physical talents of people with disabilities. the specific events are tailored to the limitations of the athletes, and it’s great! its great that even people who have more physical limitations than the average have a space to push their bodies to their personal limits, and it showcases how arbitrary those limitations actually are. the diversity of disability is vast. some of these athletes bodies look very different from their competitors, and that comes with specific physical limitations that are unique to that person. they still do sports.
Disabilities in humans are still an outlier, which is why we have a whole seperate competitive field for them to play in. It wouldn’t be fair to match them with those without disabilities.
So why, if the trans population is exploding, don’t we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.
i think we forget sometimes how utterly arbitrary sports are as an activity. its a game, for fun. anything, literally any set of arbitrary rules that involve physical movement can constitute a sport. and while we can insist that in our most special extra serious sports only certain kinds of people get to play, that doesn’t mean those restrictions are any less arbitrary, or that they have to be that way. and if you’re playing a fun game, and somebody who doesn’t have the same kind of body wants to play the fun game with you, saying that because the way their body works it won’t be fair is still not a proper justification for their exclusion, because we can change the rules whenever we want to.
Anything humans do, if you break it down enought, can become arbitrary. That’s not a reason to push people out of sports, and again, sports at these levels arent for fun, for the players, its a lifelong persuit that tales a ton of effort and sacrifice. Billions of dollars, scholarships, careers.
There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn’t have to be like that?
The issue isn’t the mostly regular people just sporting around for fun, the issue is that sports plays a big role in how a person’s life might turn out.
explicitly my argument is speaking about the way we construct sports as an activity, not sports as industry. the people for whom sports defines one’s life path are firmly the minority of people who do sports. and like, the laws we’re talking about aren’t affecting trans people’s ability to do professional sports in most cases, because those professional organizations aren’t under the jurisdiction of anti-trans state laws, they’re almost exclusively impacting children playing sports in school or for regional competitions. if you aren’t interested in engaging with the argument as it exists, and with the people who are primarily affected by laws that prevent trans children from doing sports with their peers, i’m not interested in talking further on the matter.
So why, if the trans population is exploding, don’t we have divisions specifically for all trans people? Have a trans division, have them play each other, which would allow women, men and trans people the competitive ability to place in their respective categories.
because the trans population is not “exploding”. that’s the current moral panic going around, but the visibility of trans people in media, especially right wing media, vastly overestimates how many trans people there are. there are more trans people who are out, but its still like less than 2% of the population. of that population that are athletes, even less, and there are close to no trans athletes competing at the high level you insist this conversation must primarily address. segregating trans people into their own divisions would mean trans people don’t get to play, because there aren’t enough people who are trans and doing sports to make that happen. your solution is to marginalize trans people out of the sports everybody else plays, and that sucks.
There are ways to include trans people in sports without pushing out biological women, so why must the changes we make push towards that inevitability? Why do biological women have to be trampled on to make room for others when it very clearly doesn’t have to be like that?
the only way you’ve proposed to “include” trans people in sports marginalizes them and prevents them participating with their peers, all in service of a a fear that changing the rules to be more inclusive would push out “biological women” in some hypothetical future you think is inevitable. but the reality is, there is no actual proof that allowing trans people to participate as they see fit would actually lead to the outcome you’re describing, because in many cases, they have been participating and have not been sweeping the competition.
in any case, nobody who advocates for restructuring sports away from the gender binary sees women being pushed out of sports as a desirable or even achievable outcome. the idea that we would change the rules towards a policy which does such a thing and not continue changing the rules until we arrive at a more equitable and inclusive outcome is a fantasy, almost entirely sustained by right wing reactionaries fear mongering about social change. nobody actually seriously considering the inequities of modern sports is blind to the physical differences between men and women’s bodies, and they, again, are not proposing a flattening of sporting events into a single category containing all people, just a diversity of categories representing the diversity of the human condition, and allowing people with similar bodies to compete against each other without strict delineations of gender. unless you genuinely believe that all male athletes can outperform all female athletes in all sports, which is a vast overestimation of human sexual dimorphism, there is room for co-ed competition that accommodates people according to their individual skill and strength, rather than according to whether or not they have the right genitals.
“But think of the children!” They will cry. “Boys might touch girls!”
They always seem to be thinking about children…
I hate this new ridiculous argument, trying to tie in worrying about children’s experiences to pedophilia, as if even thinking about them and how best to support/safeguard them is pedophilic in nature. 🙄 it’s very easy to see through.
Sexual dimorphism is a real thing and the reason they are split in the first place.
i mean, no, that’s ahistorical. historically, the reason they are “split” is because men didn’t let women do sports for a really long time, and when women began pushing for their own sports, men didn’t want them to be the same thing. it wasn’t some dispassionate analysis of sexual dimorphism, it was rooted in the culture of misogyny of the time, and backed by deeply held pseudo-scientific beliefs about the fragility of women. they thought that sport, like higher education, literally caused infertility, and used that as a justification to restrict women from those pursuits.
The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly. The Canadian women’s hockey team, the best women’s ice hockey team in the world, practices against high school boys, and loses.
There is no rule against women joining the NBA, or NHL, or MLS, women just aren’t capable of competing with men at the top levels of sport.
The US women’s soccer team, the best female soccer team in the world, has played exhibition games against high school boys and lost badly.
oop! maybe look up the context for that one. in short, it was a scrimmage, and as part of a structured practice routine that the US national women’s soccer team participates in as part of a youth soccer training program. not exactly representative of a competitive game, same for the women’s hockey team.
that being said, its basically a non sequitur. i’m not denying that physical differences exist, they absolutely do, but the idea that these physical differences are the primary reason our sports are structured the way they are isn’t historically accurate. there were potent social forces at work, including social forces which prevented women from participating in sports at all.
in any case, the fact that in some sports, some professional women athletes lost to some high school boy athletes in games that explicitly do not count for competition does not, to me, have some larger implications on the field of women’s sports more generally. the unquestioning acceptance of reports on these practice games for fun with children as some kind of proof that female athletes just can’t perform as well as men reveals, to me, a tendency towards confirmation bias. tell me, do you know if any prominent men’s soccer teams have ever lost to children during a practice match? i certainly don’t. exhibition matches aren’t newsworthy events. the fact that these ones were has much more to do with validating the ancient belief that men are just better than it does with genuine interest in a demonstration of friendly sport for high school kids.
So they lost on purpose? My goodness, they would not do that, the ridicule is too huge.
And the segregation of sports is the only reason we have paid professional female athletes today. Get rid of sports segregation and only have open leagues (which the “men’s” leagues are already), and you will have basically zero professional female athletes left.
And if you don’t care about women’s teams losing to teenagers, how about the time a low ranked male tennis player destroyed Venus and Serena Williams back to back, because they confidently stated they could beat any man ranked outside the top 200? And losing that was a blow to their reputations, they did not lose on purpose, they truly tried to win.
if you can’t conceive of the difference between a practice game and a game for competition, especially in the context of an explicitly educational goal, you can have fun with that. the idea that the segregation of sports is the only reason we have professional women athletes is a hilarious misunderstanding of why people like sports, and why women’s sports have been growing in popularity for decades. the idea that single games in single sports indicate anything substantive about “women’s sports” as a concept is silly.
you can live in your bubble of ignorance all you like, and insist that centuries old appeals to the superiority of the male body mean much at all to a modern context. the reality is, these stories about women losing matches? they aren’t relevant. i could not give a single shit. ranking people on numbered lists is not the only appeal of sports for audiences or athletes. Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete, and you didn’t even give that dude’s name, so whatever reputational damage seems to have both not affected her rise to prominence, and not boosted her opponents reputation, so like, who fucking cares?
why do you know so much about this? what relevance does being able to tell people all the times women lost matches in sporting events have to your daily life? to what end are you telling people these things? the reality is, you don’t value women’s sports, so you’ve scoured the internet for justifications for that belief. but people who do find value in these things don’t look at things the same way. weird ass comparisons trying to judge the objective winner by category mean fuckall to me, i like watching cool people do cool shit with their cool bodies, and the fact that you can’t conceive of people being interested in the physical skill of people that don’t look like you is firmly a you problem.
Serena Williams is still a popular and well liked athlete
Only because a women’s division exists where she can shine. In the open division she would not be good enough to gain any fame, and be just as forgotten as Karsten Braasch.
why do you know so much about this?
Because people like you keep arguing that women can compete in the open leagues, and we only have women’s leagues to segregate them from the men. This is not true, women are perfectly free to join the NBA and compete against them men, but at that level of competition they would just lose.
the reality is, you don’t value women’s sports
I value women’s sports far more than you do, because I understand their need to exist. Without them female athletes would not win in the majority of sports.
this is uh…kind of a mess as far as science goes. Making claims about completely uncited studies, and being weirdly proud of the metric that would be something that needs adjusting in an actual study, that most female athletes are cisgender and also most winning female athletes are cisgender. This needs adjusting for population, you cant say white people are more likely to be obese in America because there’s more obese white people than other races.
There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2917954/
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/21058750/
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/nejm199607043350101Which is why trans girls need to have completely blocked testosterone, usually for a full 2 years, before any kind of competition.
They literally have less testosterone than the cis girls.
as far as i can tell, the claim that most female athletes are cisgender is mostly a refutation of the political motivation, that trans women are dominating women’s sports, which is a common refrain in much of the legislation around this topic. the reality is that trans people aren’t winning any prominent competitive sports, in part because they are such a small minority of athletes.
i would honestly doubt this is something we could get a very conclusive study out of, if only because there isn’t a very huge sample size of competitive trans athletes that exist to be studied, and the ones that are there objectively haven’t been winning very many awards. nor do i think this needs to be adjusted by population. competitive sports are not a random sample, they are the self selected group of the most physically fit people for a specific task. the fact that trans women aren’t breaking records for competitive women sports, despite being in the self selected group of the women most fit for the task at hand, does say something on its own without the need for a more in depth statistical analysis.
There is no inconsistency in study results on the effects of testosterone levels
i mean, maybe read your sources a little more? two of them are about the effects of dosing testosterone in “normal male” subjects, which is not generalizable to women, or to endogenic testosterone, or to the effects of HRT for either transfeminine or transmasculine people, and the middle one is an overview of testosterone’s role in exercise in both men and women which says this in the abstract:
Findings on the testosterone response in women are equivocal with both increases and no changes observed in response to a bout of heavy resistance exercise
which directly refutes your stated claim. equivocal is a synonym for ambiguous. the effects of testosterone on resistance exercise in women is explicitly recorded as inconsistent according to the article you’re citing.
As Sabine Hossenfelder’s video on trans athletes notes (note, not all of her non-physics takes are good), sports is not about fair but interesting. There are a lot of factors that inform the capacity to do well in a given sport, and gender segregation in some sports is only an effort to filter out uninteresting matches. (Note Boxing which has weight classes as well as gender segregation).
In the information age, if we wanted, we could categorize individuals according to their athletic records and then organize matches according to similar capabilities, if we wanted. And in the end, as we start to CRISPR human genetics we’ll likely need to do this, since it will be too easy to grow our own athletes rather than rely on drafts from schools.
It’d also be nice if we didnt value people only based on their physical capacity to do well in a ceremonial battle (id est, sports) and perform in a specific moment, knowing for each of us, there will always be others who are better at it. Maybe we should appreciate that some people not born with Usain Bolt’s long legs have value as well.
gender segregation in some sports is only an effort to filter out uninteresting matches
i’d be more willing to accept this rationale if the history of gender segregation in sports wasn’t deeply rooted in misogyny. are you sure that isn’t at least partly a post-hoc rationalization for a practice that has a lot of cultural inertia?
Maybe we should appreciate that some people not born with Usain Bolt’s long legs have value as well.
i’d recommend looking into the Paralympics if you want to see what sport, and even competition, without that kind of value judgement can look like.
i’d be more willing to accept this rationale if the history of gender segregation in sports wasn’t deeply rooted in misogyny.
Oh you’re absolutely correct in asserting that womens leagues in the modern west started segregated due to bigotry by a male dominated sector. To this day we.have women glad to participate in male leagues who are boycotted and harassed for daring to cross that line (especially when they are particularly good at their sport.)
Stories in Hellenic mythology like that of Atalanta suggests games in the classic age might not have been segregated, at least in some of the city-states. There are also records of Roman gladiatrices who were sometimes pitted against their gladiator counterparts, so women’s leagues aren’t unique to modern day.
But in the 21st century, we should be looking to include everyone who wants to participate who doesnt have a substantial edge over the rest of the league, and the Olympics is headed in that direction. Also those activist groups looking to exclude trans athletes from women’s sports really have no interest in women’s sports except as a way to signal their ideological position.
Have You seen Rebecca Watson take on Sabine’s videos about trans kids care though? I think it’s an important one to watch for anyone watching Sabine’s videos. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r6Kau7bO3Fw
Yes I had. Sabine was
TERFyTE about puberty blockers despite the history of blockers being used to delay precocious puberty for decades now.Watson even mentions Hossenfelder’s take on trans athletes, that it’s less terrible. Granted, after her take on capitalism, I’m super wary of any future videos from her.
But her points on the Athletes video seemed to be a good take, that we’re less looking at fair but competitions that are interesting, and in schools, the whole point should be about inclusion and participation, getting as many students on the field passing the ball around.
I’d stopped watching her, so hadn’t dealt with that capitalism video. I’ve seen it now though. Yikes! I won’t be going back to her channel. That being said I see no reason to disagree with the point you share about sports.
